Ocean, nature, critters, and recreation

July 2016

Jul 11, 2016

When a large humpback whale washed ashore dead at Dockweiler State Beach on June 30, there was concern that the carcass would attract sharks.

Keith Poeknew it'd attract sharks, so when the whale was towed offshore for at least the third time last week – it kept drifting back in during previous attempts – the renowned shark tagger found the carcass 10 miles out in the hope of tagging and releasing sharks for science.

But the sharks ended up tagging Poe. Great white sharks, including one measuring about 18 feet, slammed his 24-foot boat sporadically over a three-day span, and one strike shoved his vessel several feet across the water.

“Words cannot describe how loud the impact was around my head [while I was] inside the boat’s v-berth,” Poe stated Saturday in a Facebook description of his extraordinary encounter. “The boat was full-on attacked 7 different times… usually at sunrise or sunset.”

The hull of Poe's vessel, Shark Tagger, is etched with scrapes caused by shark teeth (see the accompanying video).

Poe, who was operating with a tagging permit from the Marine Conservation Science Institute, arrived at the bloated whale carcass at sunset last Wednesday. Over the next two days he counted at least seven individual white sharks, most of them huge females.

The most violent attack occurred Thursday night at 7 p.m., as Poe was trying to nap inside the v-berth at the bow. The strike occurred very close to Poe’s head, and it jarred him awake.

“I thought a sailboat slammed into me because I didn’t hear a motor,” Poe said. “I was sure the fiberglass was broken through, then I saw the teeth marks and was blown away. It scared the hell out of me.”

The other attacks were more subtle. The sharks, somewhat frenzied, might have confused the hull of Poe's boat with the whale carcass. But these could simply be the actions of territorial apex predators.

He was concerned, but confident that the boat could withstand the shark attacks, and kept baits out in the hope of reeling in and tagging a shark or two.

“I only hooked up two, and lost them,” Poe bemoaned.

When he returned to port Saturday afternoon, after the sharks had abandoned the increasingly putrid whale carcass, Poe discovered the bite marks on his hull.

On Sunday, Poe said, a friend inspecting the bow of his boat discovered part of a shark’s tooth “wedged in there tight, about a half-inch deep.”

Poe, who has tagged thousands of mako sharks and was featured recently in an episode of "Shark Week," is among experts who believe that populations of large shark species Southern California are increasing.

As for humpback whale, an adult female nicknamed Wally, she was towed to sea yet another time Sunday, after drifting into Orange County waters. The cause of Wally's death is not yet known.

Jul 09, 2016

With sea surface temperatures climbing well into the 70s in many areas off Southern California, anglers eagerly await a predicted invasion of dorado from subtropical waters.

But some of the acrobatic (and delectable) game fish have already arrived, and on Saturday a drone pilot from Orange County Outdoors captured video footage of two large dorado, or mahimahi, swimming three miles off Newport Beach.

Humpback whales were feeding beyond the surf zone, but this whale chased a school of anchovies almost onto the shore.

It gulps the bait fish, directly in front of Gamble, five seconds into the video. “Oh dear,” she says in the clip, which on Thursday was widely shared on whale-themed Facebook pages.

“Although humpbacks have at times been observed lunge-feeding just outside the surf zone, it is extraordinarily rare to catch one with its belly actually on the sand,” whale researcher Alisa Schulman-Janiger posted on the public group, Cetal Fauna. “I've witnessed humpbacks feeding close to shore here, but always just outside the surf – never this close!”

This behavior has not been documented among humpback whales, but the whale in Gamble's video definitely touched its belly to sand in a determined effort to catch the fleeing anchovies, which are what attracted so many voracious gulls.

It’s not clear, however, if this was intentional strand feeding, or if this whale simply was chasing prey as far as it could before it realized it had run out of liquid real estate. Gamble said the encounter occurred on a remote stretch of beach a half-mile from the nearest parking, south of Pacific Pier, and that only a few other people witnessed the event.

“I was down there for at least 20 or 30 minutes and it was still going on when I left,” she said of the near-shore feeding. “It looked like just the one that close, but there were others not too far away.”

Gamble explained that the whale she videotaped "methodically would swim out then in along the coast, and circle around again." Last month off Pacifica, a group of surfers were riding waves when feeding humpbacks crashed the lineup, in what was also considered a rare event.

–Video screen grabs show the humpback whale gulping anchovies close to shore, and turning back toward sea.